Month: April 2017

She’s finding herself in the now again. Kelley Deal has topped charts with The Breeders but her latest outing, R. Ring’s Ignite The Rest, is perhaps the most nuanced and writerly of her career. It is, at once, immediate, gutsy, clattering and beautiful, and, make no mistake about it, Deal and Ampline’s Mike Montgomery, who…

Conventional time signatures, beware the Kraken! Polyrhythms rule the roost on Separate | Migrate, the new record from Austin’s The Kraken Quartet, self-released by the band this Friday. On songs like “Ox,” that’s a real blessing – the way marimba or vibes jigger and jaunt through a crescendo of sound before landing on their feet…

You can tell right from the get-go, from the very first shot right out of the gate, that this thing is going to be pretty damned good. Kicking off in fine form with the single “Cutter,” an infective blast of surging guitars and smoky vocals, Ignite The Rest, the full-length debut from Ohio supergroup R….

It begins, as Dw. Dunphy’s finest work does, with the voice and the voice alone, this one sweetly multi-tracked into an infinite background. “And when it’s all laid out and you wonder what it’s all about / And when it’s all played through you start to question what’s wrong with you / When the music…

It’s hard to imagine that the group behind these two pensive, funereal epics, out now on House of Mythology, is the same one that released Cortar Todo, a kaleidoscopic mélange of thudding post-metal, just two years ago. But such is the case with Zu, which has been upending expectations and rewriting formulas for the better…

Talk about a great idea for a ambient recording – just not quite fully realized. Those Who Walk Away’s debut, The Infected Mass, available now on Constellation, is the product of Winnipeg-based composer Matthew Patton. On the record, Patton, who lost his brother in a plane crash, seeks to compose a high-art brand of minimalist…

It’s tough to pin down and make any kind of broad-stroke judgments about Epithymia, the second LP by ambient power duo Anjou. I’m using the term “power” duo, of course, lightly – maybe even with a trace of sarcasm – as there’s very little thrust or vim and vigor to the new record, out a…